When H.M. Naqvi, the new posterboy of Pakistan’s tradition of exuberant fiction writing, walked up to the podium to receive the first $50,000 DSC South Asian Literature Award on the second day of the 2011 Jaipur Literature Festival, the subdued murmur of Naqvi’s readers, who were betting on him in feverish anticipation, broke forth into a loud, prolonged, ecstatic cheer. It was Pakistan’s moment under the South Asian sun. “It’s about time we South Asians got our own literary prize”, Naqvi exclaimed.
Pakistan’s writers, who have been straddling several worlds, stepping out from Karachi and Lahore and going across to New York and London, to reclaim their universe, have been the toast of literature lovers in India and abroad for a long time now. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize, had put the spotlight on Pakistan’s narrative profusion. Less than four years later, the country seems sure-footed to claim its share of literary glory.
The Jaipur Literature Festival’s official guests included some of Pakistan’s finest writers, both established and emerging — Muneeza Shamsie, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Shehryar Fazli, Zahida Hina and Ali Sethi — and, alongside Vikram Seth, Basharat Peer, Urvashi Butalia, Ramachandra Guha, they together lent the festival a strong subcontinental character. It was a testimony to the vibrant literary and cultural exchanges between India and Pakistan, and the people-to-people contact, that keep getting stronger despite the recurring political thaw-and-freeze and the agonising visa hurdles.
Today, Pakistani writers are as if in a literary marathon, and keep getting ahead of each other on the visibility index. Tranquebar recently published Shehryar Fazli’s debut novel Invitation, set in the Karachi of ’70s, against the backdrop of the formation of Bangladesh, which is beginning to get its share of acclaim. This year will see the publication of a spiritual thriller, Drowning Shadows (Amaryllis) by Karachi-based Umair Naeem who deals with the conflicts of three women’s desires and expectations.
At the festival, in a session with her mother Muneeza Shamsie on literature subverting the national narrative, Kamila said that an author needed to inhabit the worlds of her characters. As someone who grew up on Western fantasy and sci-fi novels (Time Machine) because of the lack of “Karachi novels”, she said it took her a long time to write about her city.
This, however, is not the case with most. In fact, distance from one’s own land seems to have helped shape the writings of earlier writers like Sara Suleri (Meatless Days) and Bapsi Sidhwa (Ice Candy Man), as well as the current crop of “diasporic writers”. Travel to foreign land to find a narrative voice for one’s own country and people seems integral to Pakistan’s current writers in English. But does the word “diasporic” define Pakistan’s contemporary men and women of letters? Naqvi counters: “Diasporic is not quite accurate. I believe we mostly reside in Pakistan. And sure, we do contribute to discourse. Fiction, literature, always complements reportage in reifying reality”.
For Mohsin Hamid, quite a few of Pakistan’s better-known English-language writers who have lived both in the US and Pakistan aren’t diasporic. Shehryar Fazli agrees, “Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ali Sethi, myself, and many others... are all more or less Pakistan-based, and their work is as distinguished as those who mostly live abroad. And I would say they do very much deal with major Pakistani, as well as universal, themes”.
So do the masses have a connect with contemporary Pakistani literature? Naqvi says: “The contemporary Pakistani literature has as much resonance with the average Pakistani as Midnight’s Children or The Golden Gate had with the average Indian 30 years ago”. But adds that “popular Urdu literary fiction in Pakistan is much bolder than the literary output in English”.
Bina Shah, the author of Slum Child, agrees and says that English writing in Pakistan is “a drop in the bucket of all the output of all Pakistani writers” who have written more in Urdu and other regional languages. But adds, “Each writer represents Pakistan as she or he sees and experiences it, whether as a member of the diaspora or resident here. Nobody can claim to ‘define’ the country. Countries defy definition”.
Hamid says literary fiction anywhere is read by a small minority. “Literary fiction in English in Pakistan even more so. But some of these books do find tens of thousands of readers, and are taught at public universities, so they reach beyond the elite. Still, the mass-narrative form in Pakistan right now is TV, not books,” he says. Many recent novels from Pakistan, including Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, have strong political overtones. In comparison, Indian fiction writers seem to tread a cautious, more commercial path.
According to Bina Shah, “Pakistanis have been let down by our government time and again, by geopolitical events, and by the many wrong turns our history has taken since 1947. We have plenty of national angst and it tends to come out in our writing. Perhaps Indians have more confidence, or are more content with the way things have turned out for them, so politics doesn’t engage them as much as it does us in our literature”.
But there are some chapters of history that Pakistan’s current writers in English steer clear of — India and Pakistan’s shared history and past. The freedom movement, Partition, even the Mughals and 1857, hardly find any mention. Hamid says: “What seems more urgent is Pakistani history of the last 30 years, the dramatic, ongoing, and often tragic transformations of our country during the time period spanning the two Afghanistan wars”.
Agrees Naqvi: “Great historical events — World War I, World War II, the fall of the Raj and the creation of India and Pakistan — generate a body of work. Manto, Quratulain Haider and Abdullah Hussein, for instance, have worked on issues that pertain to all of us denizens of the subcontinent. But like World War I, 1947 is not present. It might have less resonance for successive generations. We have to contend with other, more pressing matters”.
Fazli says Partition hasn’t been as emotive an event as it was for those who lived through it. “It’s not something we grapple with in the way we grapple with more recent public events, such as the Zia era, the Afghan war, nuclear South Asia, 9/11. These have become far more relevant to Pakistanis today, especially the younger lot”, he says.
Pakistan’s new generation of writers may not be rewriting it buy they are certainly making history.